Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-11-Speech-3-090"
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"en.20061011.14.3-090"2
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"Madam President, well, here we go again: another Heads of State Summit, another discussion about our competitiveness – or, should I say, lack of competitiveness – and another complete waste of time! We have been here before haven’t we? Do you remember, in March 2000, the Lisbon Agenda? I sat here and I heard this wonderful pronouncement that the EU was going to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. It is not going very well, is it, Mr Barroso? I do not think you are going to meet those targets in the course of the next three and a half years!
And then we heard it last summer, when Mr Blair came here. He stood up and told us that we had to face the challenge of globalisation, and we could only do that if Europe became competitive, if we started to invest more money in research and development. And, of course, nothing has happened again. If you really want to improve competitiveness, then what you will do this weekend is look at the 91 000 pages of close-type legislation that make up the
and decide to get rid of a substantial chunk of it. If you were serious about making Europe competitive, if you were serious about moving into the modern world, that is what you would do.
I am amused that Denmark is to be the economic study for the weekend. Well, I understand that, because they have got the highest rate of employment in the European Union. I wonder whether that is because they have got their own currency – they are able to manage their own fiscal and monetary policy. In fact, unemployment figures outside the eurozone are half those inside the eurozone. So the real conclusion this weekend is that we should be doing far less at European level, because everything the EU touches turns to disaster."@en1
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